


Dust to Dust

by Canarii



Series: Time Will Crawl [3]
Category: Ashes to Ashes, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Crack, Crossover, Episode Tag, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-07
Updated: 2009-12-07
Packaged: 2017-10-27 01:12:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 971
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/289935
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Canarii/pseuds/Canarii
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two months pass. Sally cleans the empty wine bottles out of the sink. S3 Opener tag.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dust to Dust

Sally hated hospitals. She always had, hated the antiseptic smell of bleach and cleansers covering up the scent of suffering an death. Hated the florescent lights and sterile equipment and all the white...

Which was only part of the reason she hadn't shown up until now.

She hadn't been there when it happened, not like the others. She never was, tragedy only struck when her back was turned, when she couldn't do a damn thing to stop it and could do nothing but move one, spared once again. No, Sally Sparrow had been sitting in the car with a radio like a good little civilian consultant. Which sounded a lot better than 'time traveling fraud' but wasn't much more useful. Sitting in the car, with her radio, camera, and a pair of binoculars, waiting to call in should she spot anyone fleeing the area and looking suspicious.

But she'd heard the shot. Maybe a block down, so close. Only one, even when she'd heard later there were more, it made her wonder if what she heard was the shot. She thinks it must have been.

Oh, Sally got her progress reports from Shaz, from Chris, even Ray knocked on their, (or was it her door now?) once to bring her news. She was out of surgery, hadn't regained consciousness. The wound was closing up well, no reports on her stirring. The doctors are sure she just needs a bit of time. The doctors aren't sure of anything at all. Time passes. (Doesn't it always...)

Sally doesn't know when the days started to blur together. One day there's a ring on Shaz's finger, the next, it's gone and Sally can't remember it going. She sees Ray in his ridiculous suit and wonders when he started wearing it, when that paper sign went up over the Guv's name.

Two months pass. Sally cleans the empty wine bottles out of the sink.

The entire team seems displaced, just like her. Sometimes she wonders if they'd notice if she just stopped following them to the car to go out to the latest scene. She feels like a ghost observing the mourners of another departed soul. They pass, they talk, they try not to speak ill of the people who used to inhabit the now aching spaces in the room to the point that they don't talk about them at all.

Sally paces in the hallway for an hour, until she finally drove a day nurse mad enough to demand that she either go in, or head back into the waiting room. She chose the former, iron door handle frighteningly cold under her hands. It turns slowly, like it's fighting her, and the challenge makes her press harder. Force her way in, like cracking an egg, impulsive impact that forms cracks and spills something helpless and vulnerable across the floor.

It's all kind of anti climactic when she finally does open it.

The slow beep of monitors that seem archaic to her eyes, the subtle sound of breath. ( Everything's white, who's surprised?) There's a chair, closer to the door than the bed and Sally alights in it gingerly. The chair creaks slightly under her not exactly formidable weight and she winces. Stupid really, like she was afraid of rousing the shape in the bed. Like she was sleeping and hadn't been in a coma for three months.

Sally sighed, and tried to find words, it shouldn't be difficult, she'd had all that time to prepare. (Time in which she couldn't get up the courage to come here once.) Her hands fidgeted in her lap, fingers toying with the buttons on her sleeves, passing more time. Finally, she stood, stepping nearer to the bed, then further, right up to the side of it, standing over the figure shrouded in the sterile sheets.

She doesn't look so bad, really, healthy, almost. Her eyes flutter behind lids Sally hasn't often seen without makeup, like she's going to open them any second. She probably won't. Sally doesn't know what to say, what to think, this isn't a situation she'd remotely prepared herself for. People were always taken from her in the blink of an eye, not slowly.

"Well that flat's never been cleaner", she quipped finally, the ghost of a smile quirking up the edges of her mouth. The expression doesn't last.

"Alex", she started again, "I know I haven't been round, but..." Sally trailed off again, stumbling over words in a manner so unlike her. "Look, I don't think you can actually hear me, so I'm just going to talk rubbish until I feel better about all this, okay?"

She paused like she expected an answer, pacing in a small circle before it led her to face Alex again.

"First off, you're not crazy...well, you might be, but that's not why you're here anyway. Time travel is possible and I should know, because I shouldn't be here either", she paused for a brief snort, "Bloody hell, I won't even be born for another four years, so don't you start. Just...wake up, because no matter how much you miss home, you're needed, here, now. Things are falling apart without you."

A hand brushed nervously through blonde hair, not sure what to do with itself, and Sally leaned down, bringing herself almost level with the still face in the bed, to make sure she was heard, or something silly like that, " So whatever you need to do, whatever you need to work through in that head of yours, you do it, and you hurry it up because we bloody need you."

Maybe it helped relieve her own guilt, maybe it didn't. Maybe only the walls heard, it didn't matter. Sally brushed past the irate day nurse on her way out, thinking that sometimes things just needed to be said.


End file.
